Josephine Condemi
It is not always easy to grasp the practical implications of scientific discoveries. Which were the ones that defined 2024?
The future is never what it used to be: predictions often project current circumstances forward, circumstances bound to change due to a different combination of factors, and they underestimate those that may initially seem like mere “noise” but later prove to be “signals” of what is to come. Detecting these “weak signals” is a mix of luck and training: «Chance favors the prepared mind» is a mix of luck and training: «Chance favours the prepared mind» wrote Pasteur, founder of modern microbiology and discoverer, among other things, of the rabies and cholera vaccines.
Without understanding the shared premises guiding research, placing one’s experiments into a meaningful framework is difficult. At other times, conversely, by “forgetting” what is already known one can unexpectedly reformulate questions, thereby arriving at different answers from the usual ones. In both cases, reaching a “Eureka!” moment gives joy: for those who phrase it and those who hear it, and can, at times, already imagine its effects.
From Archimedes’ Eureka to Kuhn’s paradigms
In De Architectura, Vitruvius recounts that the first “Eureka!” moment belonged to the mathematician Archimedes. Upon entering his bath, he observed how the water level rose in proportion to the volume of his submerged body. This insight enabled him to solve a puzzle that King Hiero of Syracuse posed. From sheer joy, Vitruvius tells us, Archimedes ran naked through the city streets to share his discovery. This tale, likely dating back to events around 200 BC, has helped foster the belief that science is a solitary endeavour, driven by individual strokes of genius that occur over the centuries. However, in the mid-20th century, physicist and epistemologist Thomas Kuhn explained that science does not progress through the accumulation of isolated discoveries but through the succession of paradigms, sets of universally accepted theories and tools that guide the research of entire scientific communities.
He wrote that we are accustomed to thinking that «discovering something consists of a single, simple act akin to our usual (and also debatable) concept of seeing. This is why we readily believe that discovery, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributed to an individual or a particular moment».
«But […] discovering a new kind of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event that requires recognising not only its existence but also what it is. […] discovery is a process and takes time»1.
Thus, according to Kuhn, the history of science comprises periods of “normal science”, during which a specific paradigm is followed, and periods of “revolution” when the prevailing paradigm shifts, such as the transition from the geocentric to the heliocentric theory in the 1600s. The trajectory of science is far from linear, full of elements of previous theories that are “dusted off” and recontextualised, reinterpreted as part of a collective effort in which communication between individuals plays a fundamental role.
One example is the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, researchers at Bell Laboratories, were working with a microwave antenna to improve satellite telecommunications. They noticed that the new type of antenna picked up a peculiar noise, not caused by the equipment and with consistent intensity: no matter which direction they pointed the antenna, the origin of the noise remained unexplained. They sought help from astrophysicist Robert Dicke, who recognised that this “noise” was none other than the cosmic microwave background radiation, a “trace” left by the Big Bang, the primordial explosion from which the universe originated. This radiation had been hypothesised by astrophysicist Gamow twenty years earlier, and Dicke himself was looking for it. The scientific community was thus ready to identify and verify its existence through precise calculations. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.
A scientific paradigm never fully explains all phenomena it addresses: some become “puzzles” to be solved, and sometimes the solution is found only by changing the question being asked, that is, by altering the paradigm itself. Such was the case with issues in early 20th-century physics research, such as blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect, which were inexplicable under classical electromagnetic radiation laws. These phenomena could only be described by hypothesising energy transmission in “packets”, a concept that became the foundation of quantum physics. What initially seemed a “mathematical contrivance” turned out to be the breakthrough that ushered in a paradigm shift, opening up our understanding of the infinitely small and the interactions between particles. These insights, among other things, enable technologies such as GPS, lasers, and solar panels today.
Major scientific discoveries of 2024
The journal Science has named as the 2024 Discovery of the Year2 an injectable drug, lenacapavir, which appears capable of providing six months of protection against HIV infection, the virus responsible for AIDS.
Once again, the breakthrough leading to this solution came from a new understanding of the existing: in this case, Science writes, the virus’s capsid, the protein structure that protects its core and was not considered a potential pharmacological target until twenty years ago. New research into the functioning of this structure revealed that it comprises groups of five to six molecules, making it possible to block its interactions with specific pharmacological compositions. This led to studies published this year3 demonstrating the very high efficacy of lenacapavir against HIV infection. Currently available as a “rescue therapy,” the drug could be approved in 2025 for use as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP).
In biology, Science has also highlighted the discovery of nitroplasts4, organisms resulting from the fusion of marine algae and cyanobacteria capable of fixing nitrogen within algal cells. This characteristic could benefit agriculture, as nitrogen is currently supplied to plants externally, via fertilisers or bacteria.
In palaeobiology, the journal reports the “reappearance” of Qingshania magnifica, a fossil of multicellular algae that was initially discovered in northern China decades ago but received little attention then. Since 2015, Chinese researchers have analysed another 278 specimens, revealing that the “age” of these algal fossils, 1.6 billion years, poses a challenge: according to current dating models, they should not exist5. This discovery indicates that eukaryotic organisms, those with DNA enclosed in a cellular nucleus, lived at least 600 million years earlier than previously thought.
The numbers do not add up in space either: for two years, the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to “look” at the red light from the universe’s first billion years, has been identifying more and larger galaxies than expected. The instrument can reprocess light signals previously obscured by dust: a study6 published on 13 November in Nature identified three ultra-massive galaxies, each almost the size of the Milky Way, which produced two to three times as many stars as galaxies of later epochs, growing far more rapidly than anticipated. Understanding why is one of astronomy’s new puzzles. This year, new “glasses” on our Solar System have also allowed us to observe for the first time three “new” moons, one around Uranus and two around Neptune, previously unnoticed due to their faint luminosity.7.
In archaeology, 2024 appears to mark the triumph of new technological tools in research: National Geographic8 reports the discovery of Mayan settlements in Mexico and two medieval cities in Uzbekistan using LIDAR, laser remote sensing for aerial area scanning. It also highlights the deciphering of clumps of carbonised papyri from Herculaneum’s eruption, achieved through the combined efforts of humans and artificial intelligence algorithms.
The interaction between humans and algorithms is one of the “horizons of meaning” that will guide 2025, our next journey around the Sun. Will we still carry with us the joy of being amazed and discovering that «there are more things in heaven and earth […] than are dreamt of in […] philosophy9», and therefore in science as well?
The story this article is about was discovered using an artificial intelligence tool, Asimov, developed by ASC 27, especially for Mangrovia. The tool helped us find the story, but the rest of the content you read and see is the outcome of creative processes and human sensibilities and is in no way generated by artificial intelligence. Follow us to find out the details of how we use artificial intelligence in the newsroom!
- From Kuhn, T. (1962), La struttura delle rivoluzioni scientifiche, Einaudi, pp. 78-79 ↩︎
- For the whole article, Science’s 2024 Breakthrough of the Year: Opening the door to a new era of HIV prevention. (2024, December 12). Science | AAAS. https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2024#section_breakthrough ↩︎
- To read some of the mentioned articles: Bekker, L., et al (2024). Twice-Yearly Lenacapavir or daily F/TAF for HIV prevention in cisgender women. New England Journal of Medicine, 391(13), 1179–1192. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2407001; Kelley, C. F. et al. (2024). Twice-Yearly lenacapavir for HIV prevention in men and Gender-Diverse persons. New England Journal of Medicine. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2411858 ↩︎
- To learn more about nitroplasts, Coale, T. H., Loconte, V., Turk-Kubo, K. A., Vanslembrouck, B., Mak, W. K. E., Cheung, S., Ekman, A., Chen, J., Hagino, K., Takano, Y., Nishimura, T., Adachi, M., Gros, M. L., Larabell, C., & Zehr, J. P. (2024). Nitrogen-fixing organelle in a marine alga. Science, 384(6692), 217–222. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adk1075 ↩︎
- To further explore the discovery, Pennisi, E. (2024, January 24). Microbes that gave rise to all plants and animals became multicellular 1.6 billion years ago, tiny fossils reveal. Science | AAAS. https://www.science.org/content/article/microbes-gave-rise-all-plants-and-animals-became-multicellular-1-6-billion-years-ago ↩︎
- For the mentioned study, Xiao, M., Oesch, P. A., Elbaz, D., Bing, L., Nelson, E. J., Weibel, A., Illingworth, G. D., Van Dokkum, P., Naidu, R. P., Daddi, E., Bouwens, R. J., Matthee, J., Wuyts, S., Chisholm, J., Brammer, G., Dickinson, M., Magnelli, B., Leroy, L., Schaerer, D., . . . Wyithe, J. S. B. (2024). Accelerated formation of ultra-massive galaxies in the first billion years. Nature, 635(8038), 311–315. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08094-5 ↩︎
- To learn more about the three new moons, Ansa, A. (2024, February 26). Il Sistema Solare ha tre nuove lune – Spazio e Astronomia – Ansa.it. Agenzia ANSA. https://www.ansa.it/canale_scienza/notizie/spazio_astronomia/2024/02/26/il-sistema-solare-ha-tre-nuove-lune-_b4979e5f-28e7-49e1-9a77-35d345314ab1.html ↩︎
- For more on LIDAR, 7 incredibili scoperte archeologiche del 2024. (n.a.). National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.it/7-incredibili-scoperte-archeologiche-del-2024 ↩︎
- From Shakespeare W., (n.a.) Amleto, atto I, scena V ↩︎
